Wednesday 26 Aug 2009
Master a convincing shattering-glass effect that has dozens of applications with this brilliant technique from Mark Mayers.
Photoshop’s Glass filter is often overlooked, but when it’s used creatively, it’s capable of creating some powerful and impressive visual effects. The Glass filter works by distorting an image using greyscale information, in a similar way to how bump maps in 3D applications work.
In this tutorial, Mark Mayers reveals how to create a realistic shattering glass effect using displacement maps. You’ll learn how to prepare a suitable image for displacement, and discover how Alpha channels work in conjunction with the Glass filter to distort and push out the hidden lighting and edge detail.
Next, you’ll learn how to add specular highlights and use some custom brushes to really pull off the effect. Once you’ve mastered the Glass filter, there’s nothing stopping you from playing with textures such as wood or stone as displacement maps, giving you a wealth of texturing options to add to your creative arsenal.
Some of the files used in this tutorial can be downloaded for a small cost from iStockphoto, while others are available for free from stock.xchng.
01. Create a new A4 Photoshop document, in portrait orientation in RGB and at 300dpi, with the background set to black. Buy the image from iStockphoto at tinyurl.com/ncjh5d, or use a similar image of your own.
Open the image and drop it into your working file as a new layer, labelling it ‘Face’. Now resize it, position it centrally, and drop it into a group folder labelled ‘FACE’. Next, draw a closed path around the tongue, generate a path-based selection, feather it by two pixels, then use the Burn tool to darken.
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